Fading Memories

I finally succumbed

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 17:12:00 +0200

And got myself a new telephone. When I was in Berlin for the KOffice Sprint, I get totally fed up with sms'ing with only a numerical keyboard. So I went to the shop and got myself something with a real keyboard: a Nokia E71.

My previous phone was actually the Motorola phone I received got the 2006 aKademy Award for Best Application. I clocked up about three hours of call time and about sixty sms messages since then -- I'm not a great phone user. But look what this phone can do:

Logging in with ssh on my home server!

Of course, no matter what you do, unless you get one given to you (and my daughters are now fighing over the Motorola phone), when you get a phone, you will feel ripped off. Did I get the best data plan? Shouldn't I have waited for another type of phone with just as good a keyboard, but full VGA resolution? Or maybe even got something that doesn't run S60?

Right now, I think this phone has great hardware, great design (with two minus points: the rubbery bits covering usb and micro-sd slot are tacky, and the screen resolution should be better.) and software that could be improved a lot.

I feel dumb...

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 15:47:00 +0200

Because I cannot figure out what button to click in this dialog:

ETA: I feel doubly dumb now. I accidentally burned debian twice, because when I wanted to burn the kubuntu cd for the kids' computer, I clicked on the kubuntu iso image in k3b's file manager, and it popped up the burn image dialog -- and somehow had remembered that last time I had burned the debian image (for the server, though I doubt k3b knew that). Result: 2 debian cd's, no kubuntu cd.

Another feature

Mon, 25 May 2009 11:40:00 +0200

And another contributor: Edward Apap, better known on irc as Antiquark, has created a new dialog for krita that makes it possible in an easy way to extend the canvas size. This is a patch that we had in readiness for some time already, but with the imminent release of 2.0, we can add stuff to trunk again!

Welcome to the Krita team, Antiquark!

A new feature for Krita

Fri, 22 May 2009 14:43:00 +0200

Yesterday, I took a day off from serious things like redesigning the library structure of KOffice, working on the Krita part of the redesigned KOffice website, trying to optimize the hell out of freehand painting and several other things, like being too sick to actually think straight for two consecutive moments and so not making much progress with any of these things.

I took a holiday, in short, a chance to add a nice little feature to Krita: image backgrounds.

An image background is a pattern that is tiled beneath the root layer, so that if there is anything transparent in your image, the pattern is seen below. Most useful to have a nice background, perhaps paper-like, when sketching.

This morning it was done:

Now this was just a little thing to play with, but there are several fun things about it: for one thing, I have resurrected a class that Patrick Julien wrote in 2002 and was originally responsible for painting the checker pattern. We've got different code for that now, that makes it even clearer that the checks aren't part of your image, but this class is very well suited to painting a tiled background.

Another thing is that MyPaint has a similar feature, so ideally we'd like to be able to interchange, through OpenRaster, images made in Krita and in MyPaint. We'll need to extend OpenRaster for that, though, since MyPaint saves the background as a layer as big as your image filled with the tiles, and Krita (will) save(s) the background as a property of the image.

And there is a small list of TODO's caused by this little feature, todo's that are actually almost all simple Junior Jobs:

enable Add, Remove, Reset buttons for background pattern management.
label the background patterns somehow, allow tagging
add solid-color background patterns and use a categorized view for them
add a custom-color background pattern
add lots of nice patterns
integrate with custom image widget (the one you see on startup)
integrate with image properties dialog
add to loading/saving of KisImage in .kra and .ora
set pattern on double click
allow non 64x64 pattern tiles

I used to be able

Sat, 16 May 2009 14:45:00 +0200

To read Chinese. Not very well, and only traditional characters (the simplified characters of the PRC were far beneath our dignity in Leyden, at least, when I was a student there). But that's two decades ago, and not much of the ancient skill still lingers.

Which is a pity, since I found four Chinese painting manuals for 50 cents each, dating from the seventies. It's all research for Krita! This one is, judging from the contents, especially about drawing women:

Of course, I still have got all my old dictionaries... But Chinese dictionaries are quite a pain to use. One has to know which "radical" -- the identifying part of the charachter -- the character belongs to. Then you have to count the remaining strokes, and that's generally enough to find the character in the dictionary.

For instance, I seem to remember that the first character of the title belongs to the "man" radical -- that's the two strokes to the left. The other three strokes are also a radical, namely the "earth" radical, but it's the "man" radical that's this character's radical. If I remember correctly, because it got less strokes than the other radical.

Look at this handout that still was in my New Practical Chinese-English Dictionary:

So.. We turn to page 39, where the "man" radical starts, and start looking for the characters with three extra strokes. That's on page 42/43. There we find:

We are in luck! The second meaning of the compound "shinu" means "painting portraying beautiful women". Yes, this book is about what I thought it was about!

Of course, when I studied Chinese you needed an extra board in your computer with all Chinese characters baked into ROM in order to be able to type Chinese. Internet was not for students, especially not for those language types.

These days, it should be easy to create a Chinese dictionary application that lets you draw the character using a stylus or your finger or even the mouse and then checks strokes and stroke order and comes up with the right character. However, I haven't found such an application -- most dictionary want you to find the characters using the Pinyin romanization. Which I don't know if I don't know the character...

Not that I am going to do that. I'm trying to optimize painting in Krita right now, and my compile has just finished.

I am still not convinced

Tue, 05 May 2009 20:22:00 +0200

That centralization is the way for the internet to go. Even though I work for Hyves, where we've got a silly number of messages, photos and chats stored on our servers, I still think the internet was intended to be distributed. Like email. Like the web. Like usenet.

But, well, I've got a hyves account now. I'm on linkedin. I'm on identi.ca (which forwards to twitter, which used to forward to Hyves, but I disabled that again). And now I'm on deviant art.

Our Krita Season of KDE student, Vera Lukman sort of prodded me -- we got talking about drawing and things. And I realized that I haven't touched my paints since we came to live in this house, in 2007. Probably more like not since 2006, even. I've done some sketching... Last year.

The question now is, of course, will this stimulate me to draw more? Will it finally make me use a computer for drawing? Will I get rich from selling prints?

What will happen to all my passwords if kwallet ever mangles my wallet? (Not that it has ever done so, touch would...)

Journal d'une femme de cinquante ans

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 11:37:00 +0200

I'm not sure how I arrived at the website of the Times Literary Supplement and found a review of a book based on Henriette Lucie Dillon La Tour Du Pin Gouvernet's memoirs, "Journal D'une Femme de Cinquante Ans". But is fascinating reading, these memoirs of a lady who was a maid-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette and who lives through revolutions, wars, exile and everything.

And I was so glad when I found the e-text! It was only released on March 15th... I haven't read a lot of French lately, but the nineteeth century French Lucie Dillon writes is really easy to read, probably because the French I was taught at school was already fifty years out of date back in the eighties.

But now for the sad part: it's only part 1! The fun bits, where she lives in America as an exile, making her own butter, and where she returns to Europe to hob-nob with Napoleon are missing! Please, Mireille Harmelin and Eric Vautier, I want to read on!

Looking back at four sweltering summers of code

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 21:07:00 +0200

Only the KDE Summer of Code admins still have a huge task before them -- making the final selection for KDE of the summer of code projects. The mentors have been reading hundreds of proposals, scoring them, debating them -- the KDE sub-projects have had their debates, and now it's the time for the students to wait with bated breath. Will they get a slot and spend their summer productively, having fun with their favourite project? Or are they going to help their local burger joint out?

I thought it would be nice to look back at the previous summers of code, make a list of KOffice projects, note whether their projects were a success, and whether the students are still around.

Beware...

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 12:29:00 +0200

Of people issuing "security" patches. Last week a couple of Linux distributions were suckered into updating lcms with a patch coming from a certain Andrea Barsiani. Because of an alleged security risk... Well, this patch completely and utterly broke lcms. And right at the time when we were tagging KOffice RC1, so people who run up-to-date distros started reporting crashes in Krita. We nearly got a heart attack thinking it was our code...

To quote Marti Maria, the lcms maintainer:

The short history is, a guy called Adrea Barisani, claiming to represent some obscure security company called oCERT, was providing a patch to fix a "vulnerability" they found.
At the end, the oCERT company was just Andrea Barsiani who setup ocert in 2008 to get google sponsoring.
The whole internet is now filled with hype about this "vulnerability", and in truth this "patch" breaks littlecms functionality, and probably opens some back door, so, please:
DON'T USE PATCHES FROM UNTRUSTED SOURCES.

I guess you were told something similar in school right? :-)
The problem, if any, is restricted to a very specific architecture (x86, no DEP, crafted profile).
With this patch lcms does not work at all. Please upgrade to 1.18 and let's forgot all this nasty stuff.

So, if you're packaging lcms for your distro, please upgrade to 1.18. And, please, if you patch lcms, make sure it's an official patch, from a trusted source. Like, Marti Maria...

Update: Kubuntu has a fix, and Marc Deslauriers has identified the possible culprit from the security patch. This patch was also in on 1.18b1, but removed in 1.18b2.

Lots of releases...

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 10:42:00 +0200

This week, at work, we released the 1.0 stable version of the Hyves Desktop, with source available (for almost everything but the photo uploader and editor plugin, more's the pity), and also the iPhone app, a java phone app and a firefox toolbar. It's nice to work for a company that actually ships!

KOffice 2.0 RC1 got tagged. There's a nasty file handling bug in Krita that we haven't been able to pin down, so we might need another RC, though. Or it might be an lcms issue. But getting here has been an enormous relief. KOffice 2.0 won't replace KOffice 1.6 or OpenOffice as a stable workhorse, but it is a release that really allows us to build on.

Update: : yes, it is an lcms issue -- 1.17 got a security patch last week which broke Krita. 1.18 is fine.

And then there's KDE 4.2.2 -- I'm using it with Qt 4.5, and it's pretty stable, except for some KRunner quirkiness, where urls get autocompleted but without hits, so pressing enter does nothing and I have to press end, then enter, and sometimes nothing gets executed although there are hits, especially with urls that are in the history.